Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel (26 page)

A sheet of hundreds of blackflies clustered like a moving sheet of black armor on his torso, buzzing
loudly, and there was an unbearable reek of blood and feces this close to the body. Lakini waved away the flies, which lifted a bare few seconds before returning to their ghastly feast. It was enough to see what lay beneath: the halfling had been gutted from neck to crotch, and his intestines pulled out in untidy loops to dangle at his knees.

Lakini reached out to cup his chin and lifted his head. A dirty rag had been stuffed into his mouth, and his eyes were glazed open in the extremity of pain and fear. A few black drops of dried blood spattered the pale face. Unable to look closer, Lakini let the head loll back on the chest and stood back, trying to keep her gorge from rising.

“This one was hamstrung,” said Lusk from behind her, and she turned to see her companion crouched next to the figure lying beside the ashes. Keeping an eye on the perimeter of the clearing, Lakini backed away from the disemboweled horror tied to the tree.

Lusk examined the third victim dispassionately.

“His hands are bound behind him, and he’s gagged as well. And look at this.”

Beside him, Lakini glanced down, taking in the deep vermilion slashes at the back of the halfling’s knees that sliced through cloth and flesh and sinew, and the deep gash in the throat that cut right through to the bone. She noted something else about the way he’d been bound. The halfling had long braided hair, and it had been knotted cunningly into a rope that went from the hair to the hands secured in the small of the back.

“He was forced to watch. Couldn’t get away, and the killer—or killers—secured his head so he’d have to
watch … that”—she indicated the gutted halfling on the tree, unwilling to look directly at it as this pathetic corpse had been compelled to do—“and then, I’ll wager, killed afterward.” She stole another look at the body at her feet, her mind temporarily unable to process what had happened to these people, incongruously noting the decorative beads woven into the wheat-colored hair. An image came to her, sudden and vivid, of the three little people, gathered around a cheery fire, caution forgotten in the comfort of fellowship, singing a song from their native land. Oblivious to the evil that stalked them, waiting for its chance to strike. Her eyes prickled, and she blinked the tears away.

Lusk nodded. “Only one or probably two, or else the clearing would be more torn up than it is. They must have acted quickly. Killed the lookout, immobilizing one so they could have their fun with the other.”

He rose, wiping his hand on his trousers.

Lakini swallowed the sharp-edged lump in her throat. “Who would do such a thing? We haven’t heard of bandits in this vicinity, and besides, they haven’t been robbed. It’s something a demon would do, or an acolyte of Orcus.”

“A quarrel between thieves, I’d say,” said Lusk. “Perhaps these stole from their clan, or cheated their partners or employer. Perhaps someone wanted to make an example of them.”

“No,” said Lakini. “Look. He’s not been robbed.” She pointed, and Lusk nudged the bulging pouch at the halfling’s belt with the tip of his boot. “Any thief worth his salt might kill, but quickly, without all this fuss,”

she said. “And certainly a thief would not have left coin behind.”

“Not fellow thieves, then,” Lusk conceded. He gestured at the shambles in the clearing. Sunlight slanted golden through the tops of the trees, and birds twittered and warbled in the growth above. It would have been a peaceful scene if not for the butchered bodies and the incessant buzz of the flies.

“Rangers would be stealthy enough. Or”—he pointed at the fire—“they cut wood. Druids, perhaps?”

“We have to alert the Vashtun and warn the travelers to be alert. Tell them to make sure they have double lookouts and not let them get distracted.” Lakini set her jaw. In her many lifetimes she had seen many tragedies, and brutality beyond imagination. This was not the worst thing one person had done to another, and it wouldn’t be the last in the great weave of time. “And we have to tend to the bodies. The sooner they have a decent burial, the better.”

She drew her dagger and bent to cut the rope that bound hair and hands together. To her relief, Lusk went to free the gutted halfling from his crucifixion. She didn’t think she could bear to touch that rope, thick with clotted blood.

They laid out the bodies as best they could and started back to the sanctuary. In the morning, acolytes from Shadrun-of-the-Snows would return, bury the bodies, and perform the proper rites, assuming the scavengers of night left anything to bury.

Halfway home, something occurred to Lakini, something Lusk had said before, that at the time had only just registered.

“Thieves,” she said. “You mentioned fellow thieves. How do you know they were thieves, and not simply pilgrims, or friends in search of adventure?”

The deva shrugged. “It’s a logical assumption. Halflings incline toward thievery, whether as a profession or a hobby. Or so I’ve always found.”

Lakini didn’t reply. Halflings made clever thieves, certainly, but it seemed to her a sweeping statement to make about an entire people.

When had Lusk become capable of thinking such things about an entire race? There was a time when he would have wept at the sight of such injustice.

Lusk was similarly silent until they reached the stones and pounded the earth of the established road.

“Nasty little creatures,” he said, glancing up over his shoulder at the green impassivity of the forest behind him.

Startled by the venom in his words, Lakini stifled a reply. The sight of the butchery in the clearing above them, in woods that were supposed to be sacred, must have upset him more than she thought.

Lusk glanced at her, concern as well as amusement roiling over his striped features.

“I shock you,” he said, baldly.

“A little,” she replied.

“Lakini,” he said, “do you regret destroying the barghest?”

She concentrated on the path and didn’t reply.

“And the werewolves of Wolfhelm, so many years ago,” he continued. “Should we have allowed them to live?”

“Of course not,” she snapped.

“Those lying dead beyond,” he said, pointing at the path behind him, “were thieves. Few halflings aren’t. Why else would they camp so close to the sanctuary without making themselves known? They intended to prey on the pilgrims. They chose their path, and met the consequences of their actions. Like the werewolves. Like the pirates on the
Orcsblood.
”

Lakini had a sudden, vivid memory of the baffled look of the barghest she’d killed a year ago, staring down at its dead, half-lupine mate, with Lusk’s arrow in her throat. She still felt a primal revulsion at the nature of the goblinoid’s lycanthropy and their need not only to rend their prey but to destroy all hope and joy within them. But now she felt a disconcerting, almost illogical pity.

Pity. The only hope of mortals in a world where divine forces held sway was the pity of the supremely powerful for those who could not oppose them. Pity made the gods protect the mortals who bound themselves to them, and compassion had caused them to create the deva race, souls of angels in fleshly form, sent to protect the innocent and pursue justice.

“Where is the justice in killing them, even if they are thieves?” she whispered.

Lusk’s sharp ears caught her question, and he laughed bitterly. “Tell the good folk of Wolfhelm about justice,” he said. “Those that died before we got there, those whose fathers and sisters and children were eaten. Should we have had mercy on their killers?”

She stopped, and he turned to face her, a mocking look on his face. Shocked at herself, she had to stifle an impulse to slap it off.

This wasn’t what she was supposed to be, or what
they
were supposed to be.

“That’s not the same thing,” she managed.

“No?” he said. “Explain that to Jonhan Smith. Explain it to his donkey.”

Suddenly she couldn’t look at him. She walked on, faster and faster until she was running, her breathing heavy in her ears as she left Lusk behind her on the path.

That night while she meditated in her rooms, she remembered Wolfhelm, a village in one of the remote Erlkazar baronies, nestled in the foothills between the Thornwood and the Cloven Mountains. Built on the ruins of some ancient town more prominent in its time, it was a pleasant place, trading the lavender from the sun-warmed fields around it to the bigger baronies.

But Wolfhelm, as its name suggested, was founded where lycanthropes once claimed their territory and bayed beneath the moon. And one season, while the lavender ripened and children were sent into the fields to harvest it, the werewolves came back.

Jonhan Smith and his donkey.

She and Lusk had mustered out the inhabitants of the village, arming them with any weapon that could be found and sharpened with Jonhan Smith’s skill. They knew the community’s only hope lay in driving the lycanthropes back, mercilessly, until they had killed them all.

Lakini and Lusk, needing little sleep, were on patrol. For the last two nights the weres had howled unrelentingly,
from sunset to dawn, at the very gates of Wolfhelm, and the villagers had huddled awake, unable to rest and without anything tangible to attack. The devas knew the lycanthropes were softening up their victims for the kill.

Lusk held his bow at the ready, an arrow to the string. The village had three gates: north, south, and west, and a tall wall that was unreliably warded by old spells that the local priest of Chauntea did his best to maintain. As they approached the west gate, they spotted a figure, still and pale in the moonlight. Lusk had raised his bow and Lakini had her knife in her hand before they heard the chanting and realized it was the priest, trying to weave the wards back together.

He turned when he saw them and lowered his hands, looking abashed.

“It’s dangerous out here,” said Lusk, gesturing past the gate to the hills visible beyond. “If you’re alone, a were could take you and we would never know.”

“The wards used to be so strong,” said the priest. “But now I haven’t the strength—”

His words were drowned by another howl and the sharp tearing sound of an animal screaming.

The cold silver moonlight bathed the village, making everything light and shadow. Here and there lights flickered on behind shuttered windows. The screaming was coming from the north gate, and Lakini tore the sword from its sheath as she ran, sensing Lusk close at her heels.

Jonhan the blacksmith was there in his nightshirt and bare feet. He clutched the neck of a donkey, trying with all his might to pull it from the grasp of an enormous wolf that had its claws buried deep in the animal’s sides.

The donkey was the one screaming.

The wolf was unnatural, its forelegs like muscular human arms; its head huge. It tugged once, twice, and the donkey brayed desperately as it was pulled half out of the gate. Blood, black in the moonlight, ran in glistening rivulets down its heaving sides. Jonhan lost his grip and fell on his knees in the dirt. The lycanthrope opened its maw and lunged at the animal’s back, about to tear the flesh from its spine.

Lakini moved in fast, taking her sword in an instinctive two-handed grip and swinging it underhand and up. It skimmed the top of the unfortunate donkey’s back, passing under the werewolf’s gaping jaw and through the sinewy neck. The creature’s head arced through the air and landed with a wet
thunk
between the gateposts—not far, Lakini thought, from the place where its many-times great-granddam’s skull had been staked for all to see. The body remained for a second, poised over the animal’s haunches, claws still flexing in and out of its hide. A gout of blood pulsed from the severed neck, mingling with the donkey’s blood that trickled down its sides. Then the beheaded were slowly slid to the ground. The donkey kicked it as it went down, and it flew like a giant rag doll to lie next to its own head.

Lakini turned to Jonhan, still on his knees before the donkey. He was staring over her shoulder, and his eyes widened in alarm.

The feathers of the shaft of Lusk’s arrow almost brushed her face as it sang past her, over Jonhan’s head and into the chest of the were that had loomed out of the darkness behind the blacksmith. The creature arched
backward with a cry somewhere between a growl and a human scream. Jonhan rose and stared at the werewolf as it twitched on the ground behind him.

Blindly, he grasped a halter around the donkey’s neck and pulled it away from the gates and the dismembered werewolf.

“Rosebud gets out sometimes,” he muttered, half to himself and half to Lakini, examining the wounds on the donkey’s sides. Lakini had seen the animal tethered behind the smithy, snatching at some flower boxes. “I woke up and thought she might have wandered, and then I heard that … howling. And she screamed.”

“Were you bitten?” Lakini asked the smith, as he patted Rosebud’s trembling neck.

“No,” he said.

“Think very carefully,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“That one only touched Rosebud,” he said, nodding at the body between the gates. “And then your friend killed the other before it could touch me.”